issue out of the old forms of poetry? A new
people, a new art. While admiring the literature of Louis XIV., so well
adapted to his monarchy, France will know how to have its own literature,
peculiar, personal, and national--this actual France, this France of the
nineteenth century to which Mirabeau has given its freedom and Napoleon
its power." And again:[12] "What I have been pleading for is the liberty
of art as against the despotism of systems, codes, and rules. It is my
habit to follow at all hazards what I take for inspiration, and to change
the mould as often as I change the composition. Dogmatism in the arts is
what I avoid above all things. God forbid that I should aspire to be of
the number of those, either romantics or classics, who make works
_according to their system_; who condemn themselves never to have more
than one form in mind, to always be _proving_ something, to follow any
other laws than those of their organization and of their nature. The
artificial work of such men as those, whatever talents they may possess,
does not exist for art. It is a theory, not a poetry." It is manifest
that a literary reform undertaken in this spirit would not long consent
to lend itself to the purposes of political or religious reaction, or to
limit itself to any single influence like mediaevalism, but would strike
out freely in a multitude of directions; would invent new forms and adapt
old ones to its material, and would become more and more modern, various,
and progressive. And such, in fact, was the history of Victor Hugo's
intellectual development and of the whole literary movement in France
which began with him and with De Stendhal (Henri Beyle). This assertion
of the freedom of the individual artist was naturally accompanied with
certain extravagances. "To develop freely all the caprices of thought,"
says Gautier,[13] "even if they shocked taste, convention, and rule, to
hate and repel to the utmost what Horace calls the _profanum vulgus_, and
what the moustached and hairy _rapins_ call grocers, philistines, or
bourgeois; to celebrate love with warmth enough to burn the paper (that
they wrote on); to set it up as the only end and only means of happiness;
to sanctify and deify art, regarded as a second creator; such are the
_donnees_ of the programme which each sought to realise according to his
strength; the ideal and the secret postulations of the young
romanticists."

Inasmuch as the French romantic